Word: classically
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Before I got hooked up to Turner Classic Movies, which turned 15 years old in April, a few friends issued this promise or warning: "It will change your life." Like me, they were FOOFs - friends of old films - and in the late '90s, the repertory cinemas of our New York youth, the oldies houses, had pretty much vanished. There were exceptions: one could see many artifacts of Hollywood's golden age on videocassette, the eight-track of its day. And the commercial-free American Movie Classics channel was still showing Paramount and Universal goodies from...
...when they spoke of TCM, the FOOF's voices fell into whispered reverence. People scheduled their vacations around it, obsessively taped its movies; there's a clique of Turner Classic Monastics who record, then trade, every premiere of an antique film on TCM. From its airing of films from the rowdy 1930-34 period, a new genre called pre-Code entered the FOOF phrase book along with auteur and film noir. To the faithful, TCM was the Lamborghini, the Mouton Rothschild, the very Callas of movie channels. Eventually, I got to see what all the rapture was about...
...started out good and just got better. So in homage to its decade-and-a-half on cable, I offer 15 reasons to cherish Turner Classic Movies...
...didn't, the Turner network had an edge because its library was stronger than its rival's. Turner had (and has) the grandeur of MGM, the grit of Warners, the swank of RKO. And the movies usually look great. This is a living archive; it keeps restoring classic films so they look as pristine as when they premiered. That's thanks in large part to George Feltenstein, whose title is senior vice president of theatrical catalog marketing at Warner Home Video, but who is really the boss of all things old and beautiful in the Turner trove...
...DVDs. Maybe there is a business model: Feltenstein uses the network to promote the classic DVD collection, and vice versa. The video stores and Netflix are groaning with TCM collections, the best being three editions of Forbidden Hollywood, multipacks of Warner and MGM films from the pre-Code era that TCM helped revive. (Must-buy: Vol. 3, with a half-dozen rough diamonds directed by William A. Wellman.) Last month TCM began offering personalized movies: you choose a title from a list of films that haven't yet made it to DVD, pay about $15, and get one of these...